Chinese (and all of its varieties such as Mandarin and Wu) is by far the most spoken language across the world with 1.31 billion speakers. A total of about 1.4 billion people worldwide speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

Chinese is an official language in Hong Kong, China, Macao, Taiwan and Singapore and is spoken in 20 more countries as mother tongue by a part of the population. Chinese has the highest prevalence in China.

The Chinese languages (also standardized as “Chinese”) do not denote an independent language, but a group of languages based on the Sino-Tibetan and Tibetan-Burmese language families. All Chinese languages have a uniform script and are considered as a unit by the ISO 639-1 standard, among others.

The best-known and most widely used languages are Mandarin and Cantonese. The official language in China is “High Chinese,” which is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. There are also other Chinese languages: Mandarin is spoken by about 955 million people. The main distribution areas are in China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Wu and Mineach have about 75-80 million native speakers. Both languages are only spoken in Taiwan and some regions of China.

Cantonese (also called “Yue”) is the fourth-largest Chinese language with 70 million speakers, although it is only spoken in Hong Kong, Macao and neighboring Chinese regions. The languages Gan, Jin, Hakka and Xiang are further, lesser-known languages with less than 50 million native speakers each and are spoken almost exclusively in individual regions of China.